McCloughan on his 49ers departure: “It was a great run”

The team remains silent on the situation, a day-and-a-half after the news broke, but…

I just got a text-message from out-going 49ers GM Scot McCloughan, after I asked him if he had anything to say about his departure from the team…

“It was a great run,” McCloughan said. “Players I brought in will win division for next couple of years.”

That was it. Two points I’ll add to this:

Advertisement

1) This sure does not sound like McCloughan is taking an “extended leave of absence,” the storyline that was offered to ESPN and other outlets–none of them local–yesterday.

McCloughan, by every solid indication, is leaving the team permanently. Any other shading of the situation is spin.

Maybe that’s what’s taking the 49ers so long to deal with an announcement, any announcement. They’ve tried out some spin, and it’s not taking.

Or maybe there are continuing negotiations with McCloughan about the terms and timing of his departure.

My advice: With speculation rampant, better to just say what’s happening, even if it’s not all figured out.
2) McCloughan is underlining his part in the building of this roster, which he has justification to do.

We’ll see if it leads to winning the NFC West or not. But I doubt anybody on the 49ers will be able to argue that any success they achieve in the next year years will be devoid of McCloughan influence.

I wish him the best and hope whatever made him leave works itself out.

rfwats

Could this pave the way for Dwight Clark’s return? You know who Jed likes to talk about the old days…you know, the when he was 5…

DED

Tiger Wood?

Are feekin’ kidding me?

That’s several comments by readers now speculating into the ridiculous. C’mon now. Bay area fans are suppose to be smarter than that. Must be the “transplant fans in the area.”

What garbage.

Would Scott M. be at an NCAA game the very next day after his exit if he had major family issues? Obviously not. Read between the lines people.

hibcbcbc

I cannot possibly fathom how Jed York’s stock (not that it was that high to begin with) could fall any faster and further than it has in the past 48 hours.

What an absolutely incompetent bunch of idiots these guys are.

The problem is that they are ALL joined at the hip: Singletary, McCloughan, and Jed.

McCloughan is out, but the problems with this org with not be fixed until they bring REAL football men into the building who have credibility, and Jed gets the F out of the way. Jed is UNQUALIFIED to do anything but sit in the highchair and cheer Joe Montana like he was 7 years old.

McCloughan was ok. Not great. But he also had mediocre to subpar coaches coaching the players he drafted in his time here. I know McCloughan is respected by guys like Parcells and Holmgren.

Good luck Scot.

Lets see if Jed has the cojones to get out there and be seen.

What a gutless wonder he is.

dodgerh8r

Just an opinion here, but I think leaving for personal reasons = philosophical differences between McCloughan and Jed York/Singletary. I have no proof of this obviously, but had McLoughan left for a true personal reason, the Niners would’ve at least come out by now and announced his departure, however mysterious it is.

DED

Maybe Sing or Management wants to draft CJ Spiller, and Scott was on record saying he likes only to draft the bigger type players. Hard one to speculate as to why Scott left.

Let’s hope the Niners brass doesn’t screw up this extremely important draft next month.

The timing sucks. That’s the bottom line.

JLantern

dodgerh8r,

I don’t think Scott would allow word to leak that he is having personal issues without addressing it, if this was just philosophical issues. When they say personal issues, that’s something that reflects solely on the individual and can not look good to future employers. If they just couldnt agree on who to draft, or something like that, he couldn’t allow his name to be used like this just so the franchise can save face.

Haters to the left

Hey hibcbcbc, let me get this straight – you have no idea why exactly McCloughan’s departing (only that it’s for what’s vaguely been described as “personal issues”) and yet you view that as evidence that Jed York is incompetent and his stock is dropping?

That means you’re essentially telling me that no matter what’s going on in his personal life that led to his departure, it’s the 49ers’ fault and they made a wrong decision? No matter what? If he was dismissed because he was caught in his office with hookers and coke and the team told him to get himself to rehab and dismissed him, that’s their fault?

Obviously I have no idea what’s going on either, but until we get more information either way, I’d say it’s probably best to reserve judgment on either side and just hope McCloughan gets these issues – whatever they are – resolved.

Jimmy Changa

No blogger on this site knows what happened and what the real truth is… the rest is just really bad speculation…

hibcbcbc

Hey Hater,

Open the blinds. The world is beautiful, even if viewed from your mothers basement.

I think zero response from the 49ers the last 72 hours is absolutely pathetic crisis management. They are now about 24 hours behind the story and that isn’t ok. They look like fools. That’s what I think.

So does everyone else.

You are a shill, and nothing more.

jason bourne

This is absolutely horrible news coming close to the draft when the Niners have two first round picks. Maybe McCloughan wanted to trade the two picks, move up and pick Tim Tebow?

Scot McCloughan
Pos:
Frank Gore, Vernon Davis, Patrick Willis

Negs:
Alex Smith at overall #1?

steve

It’s been a great run??? Scot’s and my definition of ‘great’ differ, greatly.

Stan…

The rest of his text ended with “Singletary sucks!,backstabbing sob!”..Should the personal issues not be so and its the ordinariy power struggle.
Well,just on one tangent allow me to point out-Singletary never showed one iota of gratitude to Hill or Martz for winning his job. I never saw a winning QB be given such a total lack of any credit from his head coach in my almost 40 years of football reading. Of course he did follow that with the meek Smith too.
In other words-if I worked for the 49ers,Singletarys Christian overlook of the org. is like the Spanish Inquisition,if your not %110 for him you WILL be purged.
Somebody check the neighborhood rack-Scotty could be on it this very moment…

Doc K

#8 LOL

I concur. The dude is a d-bag with a good heart coated in silver spoons.

Jimmy Changa

hibcbcbc is nothing but a pathetic miserable person with nothing in his life but desperation and self-loathing..and clearly enjoys playing the part of the fool…

prima facie

Disagreement over a draft pick is no reason to can anyone or to quit. That’s silly. It has to be an overall philosophical issue or something, well, personal.

Whatever it is, it’s been around long enough that the timing is incredibly poor. Further evidence that this organization is a long way from where it must be.

Scott A

“It was a great battle.”
– General Custer

Twinkie defense

Man the ‘Niners are so dysfunctional… what’s next, they sign Pacman Jones? 😆

BigDiggyD

This is truly stunning… we may never truly know what happened, but I have a hard time imagining that nothing significant occurred to trigger this.. if you are the front office and you are down on McC then you can him once last season was over.. you don’t do it now.. right in the middle of free agency and prep for the draft.

Say what you will about McC’s performance as a Niner, he is one of the most highly regarded talent evaluators in the league among his peers. Don’t be surprised if he name surfaces with Holmgren and the Browns or with the Packers.

what? this guy was responsible for alex smith AND mike nolan. his tenure is down to those two guys. by next year and maybe by mid-season TK will be writing about what was the failure of the smith-nolan-mcloughan era.

“i don’t care how many patrick willis’s he drafted, for every patrick willis, joe staley, dashon golden there is a kentawn balmer, manny lawson (12 sacks in 4 seasons), brandon williams (who?), jason hill etc…..” — Well then you’re not too bright. McCloughan wasn’t a star GM but he developed a good reputation around the league the last couple of years. Every GM drafts some busts… did you just start following the NFL? BTW – you forgot Davis, Gore, Crabtree and a few others. His draft record was about average. And is GOLDSON not golden. Geez dude, pay attention.

that’s what i’m saying he’s an average drafter, but average doesn’t get you to the playoffs.

you’re claiming crabtree…even i dope like me would’ve taken him.

davis? great year…but does one good year make up for the other 3 “buster” years. maybe a better vernon davis gets them into the playoffs in 2006 or 2008. i expect 4 good years from the #6 pick in the draft

gore, great character, great player, injury prone, fumbler. i’ll take the good with the bad.

goldson – great pick.

pile on top of that picking mike nolan and alex smith and you drop him from not a star GM to a chump.

i guess you are happy to be 8-8 every year. did i just start watching football? wow! i wish i just started watching football, then i wouldn’t have to had gone through the Nolan-Smith-Mcwhatever his name is tenure.

“Well, just on one tangent allow me to point out-Singletary never showed one iota of gratitude to Hill or Martz for winning his job. I never saw a winning QB be given such a total lack of any credit from his head coach in my almost 40 years of football reading.”

I’d like to add to Stan’s list that when Ted Tollner was fired, Singletary didn’t even mention his name. A reporter had to ask him and Singletary said, “He’s gone to.”
He didn’t even mention Tollner by name. If it wasn’t for Tollner, Singletary wouldn’t have a job either. Tollner was called in midway in the 2008 season to bail out Hostler. He and Hill clicked and the team went on a little run. He was retained by Martz and was no doubt a help to Hill.

Singletary is a freaking egomaniacal, psychopath, parading as Christian. He’s a phony and I can’t wait to see him punch Paraag out sometime before the end of next season.

BTW, it was not a great run. It was a mediocre jog at best. Like everything else in Santa Clara, we’re never really sure who does or did what except that we know that McCLoughan went all fight club on Singletary and Nolan to draft Willis. If you want to know what this means, He allowed Nolan and Singletary two minutes of eye time to see who would blink first. It was Singletary. Those bug eyes dry out pretty easily.

overdue

Why cant Don Nelson and the rest of the Warriors executive office do this…

hibcbcbc

Man, the Niner shills are rapidly approaching Warrior Shills status.

Sad.

Never seen so many folks passionately defend an organization going nowhere.

toby

according to matt m of the santa rosa press…..mc c said that while doing his job he lost sight of his family……would the brain cell that helps you remember family be the same brain cell that helps you evaluate football talent?….that sucker has been dead for sometime……roll out the monkey with the dart board i’m positive the monkey can hit the bulls-eye at least one or two times in a hundred tries….just like scott. his great run amounts to running this train wreck into the ground!

Holy Toledo

It is really amazing what a sad mess both the raiders and niners are. So we are to believe that McCloughan’s alleged “family matters” were the cause of his departure…except that he was essentially fired. I guess McCloughan himself could not see his problematic family matters but the wise-beyond-his-years Jed York somehow did and saved his GM’s family life by canning him. Sure.

Then in Oakland we get the weird conglomeration of tenders…its good to be Stanford Routt. The embattled QB shows up and is thought to have gotten in some kind of shape, except the raiders won’t let the media and fans have a look at him until May. It would seem that putting a fitter Jamarcus in front of some cameras would be a good way to begin to get the fans back on his side. Unless none of it was true and his offseason training program was actually at Arbys.

And both teams will probably still charge season ticket holders full price for preseason games. Good times.

jakartaniner

I am a life long niner fan but have lived overseas for the last 7 years so I don’t follow things as closely as I could if I was back in the Bay Area… my question is: why all the hate for Paraag? What exactly is a ‘football guy?’ With many successful teams moving towards a more ‘moneyball’ concept in evaluating talent and building teams, why not let someone like Paraag have a go at making personal decisions?

Tiger Woods? If so, I hope McCloughan’s texts are better than his press conferences.

Roscoe

Tim, It would also be hard to deny McCloughan’s influence in retarding the growth of the roster over the past 5 years. He has been in charge of player acquisition yet there are still glaring holes, like the entirity of the OL. Nobody takes this long to rebuild if they have even an inkling of what they’re doing. He is supposedly not being fired over football matters … this would make a lot more sense if he was. In fact he should have gone out the door with Nolan.

hapkidokid

“It was a great run” Really, is that what it was?? Silly me, i didn’t realize i was watching a great run these past 5 years. How unappreciative of me!

“Players I brought in will win division for next couple of years.” What a hack. Any sympathy he may have engendered was killed by this entirely self-serving comment. If the niners do go on to any modicum of success, he’s already taken credit, even though his high water mark in 5 years was 8-8. And if they don’t, he will claim that he put all the pieces in place, they should have won, maybe if they’d kept him they would have. Good bye and good riddance.

Chris Webber

Man. Enough of the McClueless coverage. It’s not like he died or built this team into a contender while he was here.

Leonard Bonilla

Jon Gruden would be good. But the problem with that is one person. Singeltary! Singeltary is in the middle of this, you watch.

Aaron

His outgoing quote underlines the Niners biggest weakness over the past decade; they’ve always over-valued their talent. The players he brought in, mainly the line, need to leave before we win the division.

Stan…

Cam Iman today(in so many words) wrote that the proof McCloughan was a brilliant and talented man was that he and Iman agreed on football matters…(!). Hey,thats how I judge how smart you are-if you agree with me than you MUST be sheer genius-lol!

“I am a life long niner fan but have lived overseas for the last 7 years so I don’t follow things as closely as I could if I was back in the Bay Area… my question is: why all the hate for Paraag? What exactly is a ‘football guy?’ With many successful teams moving towards a more ‘moneyball’ concept in evaluating talent and building teams, why not let someone like Paraag have a go at making personal decisions?”

Ultimately, it’s Jed’s toy and if that’s how he wants to run The Niners, so be it, but at least have the sack to say that’s how you want to do it. Mike Silver says that McCloughan was blindsided–meaning they took all his draft info and moved the files–then they called him in and sacked him.

That’s pretty much how it went down.

But they are trying to get out of paying him the rest of his contract so they are leaking “personal issues” to the media.

How you get there is almost as important as the destination.

Pretzel

@#33 As a 49ers fan, if you think of Paraag, you have to bring up our former GM Terry Donahue. They are responsible for ruining the 49ers for almost a decade by drafting horrible players. They evaluated talent through numbers/stats. These methods have given golden eggs like Rumph, Kwame Harris, Raushaun Woods etc…

When McCloughan took over 49ers had 0 talent. We were playing players taken off the street. Yes, McCloughan made some bad draft choices, but our talent level has increased significantly.

If this was a power move by Paraag, 49ers are in deep trouble. He is like Robert Rowell’s football counterpart…he has no business making football decisions.

lance newberry

I’m not McC fan, but I don’t see this making things better.

The chances of non-football suit like Maraath, or a brain-dead proven loser like Dwight Clark or Vinny Cerato getting the job are better than Lil’ Jed actually finding & hiring someone who is top caliber.

Clark is a finalist in any conversation about worst GMs of all time, but he fits the mold of nothing more than a eunuch minion to a power-crazed leader (Carman Policy in Clarks case) which is very possibly what Jed actually is.

McC haters you’ve got your wish, but as always it could be a case of “be careful what you wish for”. Now we’ll see if Jed can make this work or how much farther this organization can fall.

painday

“But I doubt anybody on the 49ers will be able to argue that any success they achieve in the next year years will be devoid of McCloughan influence.”

But the reality is if they win the division next season…they will have overcome many sub par picks by McCloughen. Balmer, Snyder, Rachel, Baas, Reggie Smith ( Mario Manningham was still available) , Brandon Williams ( 3rd round pick) and of course Alex Smith…and still having him around let alone still starting.

Baas took 3 seasons to start. He was the first pick in the second rd. Alex Smith sucks, and is not a super bowl quality qb. We have seen the best play the position of qb. So don’t tell me to not beleive what I see. Alex Smith is the personification of system qb. He can’t function out of that system. And he is who we are betting on leading the team to the playoffs? That is why he’s gone. Jed realized this clown is too stuck to players he picked high to see reality. McCloughen seems like a good guy. But I want winners. And a team led by Alex is not going that direction.

The season ticket holders are jumping off the ship. I gave up mine after 30 seasons. I am tired of this half hearted attempt at winning. The Yorks don’t realize that when you are 500, your closer to being bad than good. They should have been spending this off season to fill the wholes that they have. What would Eddie D do with no salery cap? The draft is a 2 to 3 year thing. Just look at his track record. Only 1 of the 4 o lineman he has picked started as a rookie.

You can’t assume you can fill your starting tackle spot in the draft since most of his picks have not been ready to play. Good riddens Scott. Sure could use that Aaron Rogers to DeSean Jackson passing combo, Jacka$$.

The interesting thing is will they get a real NFL guy in to run the team…or hire from within. From within is a huge mistake. ” Praag…what does your computer say about this player?” A total failure is what that would be. At least I won’t be paying for it this time.